[First 47 sighting of the new year.]

The 47th Paving & Transportation conference opens at 8 a.m. on January 4th, 2010. …The meeting features the latest research into pavements, and panels on how best to communicate information about highway projects to the public.

UNM Today: Paving and Transportation Conference Kicks Off Jan. 4th

Sightseeing Helicopter Crashes In Hawaii Decrease Following FAA Regulations But Proportion Of Fatal Crashes Increases
An emergency rule intended to reduce the number of deaths and injuries associated with Hawaiian air tours was followed by a 47 percent reduction in sightseeing crashes, according to a new study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Injury Research and Policy.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090626091129.htm

Experts: Big Tobacco Dead By 2047, Possibly Sooner

President Barack Obama’s signature on a bill this week to grant the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory authority over tobacco was historic, and represents a step in the march to eliminate tobacco use in this country by 2047, two national tobacco experts said on June 25.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090625201818.htm

Joe Biden is the 47th Vice President (per Jeopardy).

The Washington Post has won 47 Pulitzer Prizes (per Inside Facebook).

Is the Twitpocalypse nigh?

2147483647. You might recognize it as the maximum value of an integer in several programming languages, or the highest score you can get in a lot of video games, or a number that pops up when you get a database error message. Well, Twitter’s numbered tweets are fast approaching 2147483647, and, although I’m sure Twitter’s databases are properly configured, a site called Twitpocalypse is speculating that some Twitter apps won’t be prepared, causing them to stop working when they can’t access tweets beyond the magic number.

According to the site, the Twitpocalypse is scheduled for June 14th at 4:46 PM GMT

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/06/10/is-the-twitpocalypse-nigh/

2147483647 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The number 2,147,483,647 is also the maximum value for a 32-bit signed integer in computing. It is therefore the maximum value for variables declared as int in many programming languages running on popular CPUs, and the maximum possible score for many video games. The appearance of the number often reflects an error, overflow condition, or missing value.

The data type time_t, used on operating systems such as Unix, is a 32-bit signed integer counting the number of seconds since the start of the Unix epoch (midnight UTC of January 1, 1970). The latest time that can be represented this way is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038 (corresponding to 2,147,483,647 seconds since the start of the epoch), so that systems using a 32-bit time_t type are susceptible to the Year 2038 problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2147483647

ScienceDaily (May 19, 2009) — Scientists have found a 47-million-year-old human ancestor. Discovered in Messel Pit, Germany, the fossil, described as Darwinius masillae, is 20 times older than most fossils that explain human evolution.

Common Ancestor Of Humans, Modern Primates? ‘Extraordinary’ Fossil Is 47 Million Years Old